Craig, Loved the last post…and you didn’t even need a debate to do it.

I doubt many would make a huge leap to someone who is the polar-opposite of Obama, unless already inclined to do so. I think Mitt makes it easier for a 3rd-party candidate to really make things interesting. Who would it help, and, could a 3rd-party nom actually win the general? I think this may be the election that breaks through.

ct – Political pond scum. They didn’t build DC on a swamp for nuthin’.

“Rick Santorum has often called for limits medical malpractice lawsuits, but back in 1999, his wife Karen sued her chiropractor $500,000…telling the jury that the injury caused his wife pain and impaired her ability to campaign for him…She wants to look nice, so it’s really difficult.”

“He and his wife, he said, “knocked on 20,000 doors together” during his last campaign, but now she “doesn’t have the confidence to do that.”

Never would I make light of anybody’s back problems (it sucks) but it looks like we need a cartoon of Santorum talking out of multiple orifices, too. (Also, pain & loss of functionality would have been more supportive words than wanting to look nice, whatever he meant by that, and loss of confidence.)

ct – Yes, the MSM will fight to control the message. however, they aren’t the only game in town these days. How much could Buddy Roemer or Ron Paul do via other outlets? To paraphrase: How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm, once they get a twitter feed? Can’t wait to see how Occupy plays into this in the spring.

This whole free contraceptive mandate has the First Lady written all over it.

…and maybe we just found out the value of Valeria Jarrett.

Or not, but we know women made it possible for Pres. Obama to stand up.

Nobody starts out looking to get an abortion. But it is legal. It’s a mighty heavy outcome so if we can prevent it we must.

What just occurred has been brewing for a long, long time and is what we’ve been waiting for, which is the end of the most common abortions. The whole delicious design of reproductive goo simply has to merge with contraceptive access, regardless of means.

Sorry..that last info I linked may be old info. It’s confusing. The site says they no longer actively updates. I was trying to find an article I read yesterday about how healthcare costs have risen recently and this came up. It wasn’t what I was looking for.

Perhaps the biggest political puzzle of our time is why, as the lives of working-class whites have descended from the stability and comfort of “All in the Family” to the chaos and despair of “Gran Torino” and “Winter’s Bone,” these same Americans have voted more and more reliably Republican. Sunday’s Times had a fascinating and disturbing lead story about the pattern of government dependency around the country. A map showing areas of greatest reliance on public benefits corresponds with weird exactness to the map of red America: the South, Appalachia, and rural areas in general.
In addition, reliance on the safety net has more than doubled in the past four decades. During the same period, median incomes in America have stagnated or declined.

Oh god, listening to Morning Joe, Mika must have had to much coffee..Tripping over herself to respect Santorum’s views on birth control..No Mika, his views are not something we need to have a conversation about other than to write him off as a religious zealot…The lies he tells about this Presidents supposed attacks on religious freedoms expose him for who he is..

The general election will be over right after the convention if he is the candidate

The recent post about why can’t we get along is fine for thirty minutes of tv but the problem with the rightwing is they do not move on. If the don’t win – they just get more money and revive the fight. They subvert the very foundations of democracy when they don’t get their way

the way it is being reported, it sounds like both which I wouldn’t agree with. I would be fine with his lowering the State flag for a resident of note, but the US flag is only supposed to be lowered for declared national events and/or government offices and sometimes police/soldiers killed in the line of duty.

Mellisa Harris Perry just used the JFK and Catholicism and the fear Repubs had for the first Catholic president. That is the same argument I used last week wrt to the birth control dust up. I feel vindicated.

On February 14 at 8:47 AM, I posted what I think are the components of “Free Market Competitiveness”, the race to the bottom of the barrel. The first two points were:• The factors of production will be employed only if it is profitable to do so and will fail to provide certain goods and services.
• Allocates production and resources to the goods and services for those consumers who have more money and thus provide a greater profit.

I did not realize at the time how soon current events would provide the confirmation. The childhood leukemia drug Methotrexate with a 90% sucess rate. Methotrexate is a generic drug that the pharmaceutical companies don’t make a lot of money on. Methotrexate shortages is only one of a long list of 286 other drugs that are facing supply exhaustion.

Who needs “federal death panels” when you have big business doing it based upon profit. The drug companies don’t make enough profit from the drug, let the children die. What about the other 285 drugs? How many will die without those drugs?

The drug, which cures up to 90 percent of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), has been in short supply for the past year-and-a-half, and in far shorter supply in recent weeks because a leading maker of the drug shut down some of its factories last year.

“This is dire,” said Jensen. “Supplies are just not meeting demand.”

Ben Venue Laboratories was one of the nation’s largest suppliers of injectable preservative-free Methotrexate, but the company suspended operations at its Bedford, Ohio plant because of “significant manufacturing and quality concerns,” the company announced.

Since then, drug supplies have gradually dwindled.

“This is a crisis that I hope the FDA’s hard work can help to avert,” Dr. Michael P. Link, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, told the New York Times. “We have worked very hard to take what was an incurable disease and make it curable for 90 percent of the cases. But if we can’t get this drug anymore, that sets us back decades.”

One of our big beefs about the pending mortgage settlement has been the failure of prosecutors and regulators to do anything remotely resembling serious investigations. You don’t settle on known, easy to prove abuses (particularly when you choose not to know their extent) and leave yourself with a grab bag of mainly more difficult to ferret out ones to consider going after later.

We’ve seen repeatedly that small scale investigations in the servicing and foreclosure arena have found widespread problems. For instance, one by Abigail Field of foreclosures in two counties in New York found a complete fail by Countrywide of transferring notes to trusts in its own securitizations. Registers of deeds Jeff Thingpen in Guiford County, North Carolina found widespread evidence of robosigning. John O’Brien of Southern Essex County, Massachusetts, conducted an audit and found, per Dave Dayen:

‘• Only 16% of assignments of mortgage are valid
• 75% of assignments of mortgage are invalid.
• 9% of assignments of mortgage are questionable
• 27% of the invalid assignments are fraudulent, 35% are “robo-signed” and 10% violate the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
• The identity of financial institutions that are current owners of the mortgages could only be determined for 287 out of 473 (60%)
• There are 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing approximately $180,000 in lost recording fees per 1,000 mortgages whose current ownership can be traced.

Housekeeping: Can’t remember who but saw a grumble about the Like button while back and just wanted to again say what it does for us. I agree we don’t want it to be a goofy popularity thing, but the featured comments on the side bar really do draw lurkers into reading the rest of the comments sections. I see a lot of click-thrus from there. And I like this system where you guys choose which ones to feature. Think of it as a way to spotlight comments that’ll draw the attention of lurkers and get more eyeballs on the rest of the comments. So often I’m told we have one of the most readable comment communities on the web and I’m always looking for ways to showcase it.